It is astonishing that Simón Bolívar, the great Liberator of South America, is not better known in the United States. His life is a big-screen epic straight out of Hollywood: he freed six countries from Spanish rule, traveled more than 75,000 miles on horseback to do so, and became the greatest figure in Latin American history. He fought battle after battle in punishing terrain, forged shaky coalitions of competing forces and races, lost his beautiful wife soon after they married and never took another (although he did have a succession of mistresses, including one who held up the revolution and another who saved his life), and he died relatively young, not knowing that his achievements would endure. Marie Arana—born in Lima, Peru, and the author of the National Book Award finalist American Chica and The Writing Life, a collection of her columns for the Washington Post—paints Bolívar as a man of many facets: fearless general, brilliant strategist, consummate diplomat, passionate abolitionist, gifted writer, and flawed politician.

"Arana is an indefatigable researcher, a perceptive historian, and a luminous writer, as shown in her defining, exhilarating biography of the great South American liberator Simón Bolívar.... Her understanding of the man behind the fame—and behind the hostility that enveloped him in his later years—brings this biography to the heights of the art and craft of life-writing."—Booklist (Top 10 Biographies of the Year)